Introducing Teatro Valle – searching for a European commons

‘European
citizenship’ is a ‘constituent’ process that emerges, develops and is
constantly elaborated within social practices. How does the practice of the
commons effect it? This week’s guest feature reports back on an experiment
conducted last September in Teatro Valle.

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This week's openDemocracy guest feature,
entitled Teatro Valle – Searching for a
European Commons is edited byDario Gentili and Andrea Mura,
two research fellows in philosophy respectively working in Italy and the United
Kingdom.

We
want to offer you a taste of the highly significant experience of Teatro Valle,
the oldest theatre in Rome, which, following its occupation by a large group of
citizens in 2011, has achieved international recognition for its attempts to
elaborate new social, political and cultural practices around the idea of
direct democracy and cultural commons.

The
articles that follow this week aim to offer you a sense of this occupation over the last few years, and the kind of critical reflections
that have accompanied Teatro Valle Occupato’s trajectory around the concept and
practice of common goods.

Here
are contributions by some of the researchers, activist and artistic groups that
in Teatro Valle last September 2013 attended a major event with the express desire
of enacting new forms of dialogue and sharing based on the practice of the commons at a European level.

The
event, Spatial Struggle, arose from
the joint initiative of Teatro Valle Occupato and the Oecumene Project (Open
University), an EU-funded project whose research agenda – as familiar to readers
of openDemocracy – has been precisely
to rethink citizenship beyond traditional tropes in contemporary European thought.

This
shared ‘search for a European commons’, however, also became possible only
thanks to the collaboration of a number of other groups (Quinto Stato, Macao, Nuovo Cinema Palazzo, Metropoliz, Teatro
Rossi Aperto, Mezzocannone Occupato) as well as individual contributors. Collective
rehearsals, discussions, art and staged film performances allowed artists,
activists, researchers and ordinary citizens to narrate and represent their own
‘acts’ of citizenship, assuming indeed that ‘European citizenship’ is a
‘constituent’ process that emerges, develops and is constantly elaborated
within social practices. The event included keynote speeches by Costas
Douzinas, David Harvey, and Engin Isin, eliciting widespread interest in the
public in a moment marked by crucial economic and political difficulties in the
Italian context.

Guest editors, Dario Gentili and Andrea Mura introduce their
authors

In
Italy, encounters based on the ‘commons’ have been used to rethink the idea of
citizenship, allowing for a political and legal conceptualisation that moves
beyond the institutional framework of the state, highlighting its dimension as
a social practice. This Monday we launched with, ‘The
austerity of the commons: a struggle for the essential’, to introduce you
to the rather unique concept and practice of the commons in Italy, and a second article by members of the
‘collective’ running the Teatro Valle Occupato, ‘Spatial
struggles’ which offers an insight into the experience of ‘Valle’ as a
theatre that is also an agora.

This is accompanied by video materials by Macao, another
important experimental space in Italy, which contributed to the Spatial Struggle event. The videos expose
the relation between speculative investing in real estate, financial speculation,
and abandoned and unoccupied buildings – often architectural monstrosities
devastating the surrounding environment – and point to the possibility for
critical and constructive interventions, as was the case with the formation of Macao, when a group of
activists and art workers occupied an empty skyscraper in Milan, Torre Galfa, transforming
it into a new influential Arts, Culture and Research Centre in the city.

On Tuesday we published,‘Why an empty space
(tent) in an occupied theatre?’,
to give you direct access to the artistic dimension of the event, which included a panel of artists who had been collectively invited to interrogate their
poetics as well as their artistic practice as an act of resistance. Among the
artists, the theatre company Motus set up a refugee tent
inside the theatre, re-creating the ‘scenic’ space of their last work, Caliban
Cannibal, in which a post-colonial reading of Shakespeare’s play The
Tempest was enacted and staged. In their contribution to the guest
week they offer a literary account of their contribution to Spatial
Struggles, together with a video of the group’s work.

On Wednesday, a contribution from Engin Isin, keynote speaker at the event, entitled ‘Acts, Affects, Calls’, considers the ability of art, when it is making a political intervention, to govern our bodies as well as our minds, through bodily affects.

On Thursday in ‘What is
the fifth estate?’,Giuseppe Allegri and Roberto Ciccarelli turned to the examination of the
condition and practice of the Fifth Estate, which, besides being an existential condition for millions of
people, is also a network of citizens in Italy exchanging their experience and
the results of their experiments. This group too contributed to Spatial
Struggle.

This Friday, Maria Rosaria
Marella looked at the commons as a legal entity. Her article chronicles the formation of a ‘Constituent Assembly
of the commons (CAC)’, first gathered together
at the Teatro Valle Occupato in Rome in 2012 in an important legal, social and political experiment, attempting to rethink the notion of the ‘commons’ in legal terms
through an ‘original alliance’ between legal theorists and movements.

Costas Douzinas, who also contributed to the event as keynote speaker, concludes our Teatro Valle guest feature today, Saturday, with an article on ‘The age of resistance’, and a Mediterranean in ferment.

Two video interviews with
David Harvey and Rosi Braidotti, accompany the week's feature. The interview with
David Harvey was recorded at Teatro Valle during the event, and
retains some of the flavour of Spatial Struggle. But both
interviews are part of a broader project by Andrea Mura entitled ‘Indebted
Citizenship’, and conducted on behalf of the Oecumene Project and
the Open University’s Centre for Citizenship, Identity and Governance (CCIG) to
help frame the wider context of crisis and austerity within which the Teatro
Valle event was designed and played out.

All the articles are enriched with
photographs from the event, courtesy of Tiziana Tomasulo, from the collective
of Teatro Valle Occupato, and the Nuovo Cinema Palazzo, an ex-cinema in a historic district of Rome that was occupied by citizens, artists and students to block the scheduled
opening of a casino. This space too was transformed into another experimental space for artistic,
cultural and social production.

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